5 Easy Ways to Spot a B.S. News Story on the Internet

The Internet, while awesome, is also a mind-boggling marvel of bullshit production and dissemination. A misleading or outright fake news story can get forwarded on Facebook a million times before Snopes.com can even write up their rebuttal (no, oral sex does not prevent breast cancer). Since the rise of social media, we get more and more of our news from each other, and far, far too many of us aren't asking ourselves the important question:

"Is the amazing news I'm about to share even fucking true?"

Because most of the time, we don't need somebody else to debunk these stories for us -- not if we know what to look for. For instance, it should always raise red flags if ...

"Vaccinated Children Five Times More Prone to Disease Than Unvaccinated Children AND ALSO WI-FI IS CAUSING WORMS TO GROW IN YOUR BRAIN" -Hobo talking to his pet rat on the subway

I'm not saying all news has to come from The New York Times or the BBC -- I think I only learned Obama won re-election because Mike Tyson mentioned it on Twitter. But for the love of God, if you're going to forward me a link on Facebook about some earth-shattering piece of health news, I'd better not hover my mouse over the link and see it's from fucking AlienTruthRevealed.blogspot.com. I swear that 95 percent of the misinformation on the Internet could be stopped in its tracks if people would just take a few seconds to look at the source of the amazing headline they just read before hitting the Facebook "share" button.

In the case of that vaccination story above, it came from NaturalNews.com. And, to be fair, it kind of sounds like a legit site. (Isn't there a prestigious scientific journal called Nature? It's probably related to those guys!) It's only when you read down to the bottom that you see that their anti-vaccine study was based on an online poll conducted at a website called VaccineInjury.info. That is, an anti-vaccine blog got their readers to click buttons on a page agreeing that vaccines are terrible (obviously every study ever done disagrees). But how many parents just skimmed and forwarded it along with an accompanying post like "Scary stuff!!!"

Jupiterimages/Goodshoot/Getty Images"Wait, this is just pain juice. Where's the one for premature death?"

I understand it's not always obvious by just glancing at the URL -- purveyors of bullshit news have figured out how to sneak their product onto domains that also host legit news. For instance, a while back I mentioned a shocking story that ran on Reuters about how fluoride harms brain function, but a closer examination showed that it was just a press release by anti-fluoride wackjobs hosted on a separate part of Reuters' website (with no oversight or fact checking -- you could write one right now and they'd post it).

Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images"Finally, my Legolas erotic love story will see the light of day."

Remember, there's a lot of money to be made from bullshit -- that traffic pays the same as any, and they're getting very good at tricking us into doing their promotional work for them. And that goes double if ...

I guarantee that everyone reading this has clicked on, and believed, a bullshit Daily Mail story within the last year. Their website has become the most popular news website in the world, largely because of their talent for getting Americans to forward their bullshit to each other.

Polka Dot Images/Polka Dot/Getty Images"Ha! That guy got a whole child stuck in his asshole. Send that to Tom and tell him he owes me 10 bucks."

The Daily Mail and The Sun are tabloids -- I'm not using the word "bullshit" lightly here. It's a little bit easier to see with The Sun (typical headline: "Aaron, 9, 'Bullied to Death for Being White' -- Family Blames Asian Yobs for Suicide"), but a huge number of Americans don't seem to realize that The Daily Mail is just as bad. They're so much better at hiding it -- go to their front page and they'll have four real stories and then one they just pulled out of their asses. And I mean literally they'll just make up a fictional story, usually about the danger of immigrants/foreigners/Muslims, or salacious sex-related crimes, or the horrors of feminism.

For instance, they ran an outrageous "crazy ex-girlfriend story" with the headline "Dentist Anna Mackowiak Pulls Out Her Ex-Boyfriend's Teeth" (they made sure this happened in Poland, to get the "crazy foreigner" aspect in there). The story went viral and was picked up by Fox News, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Daily News, as well as every fucking news aggregator website on Earth. When somebody finally looked into it and it turned out that none of the people involved actually existed, The Daily Mail said they weren't quite sure where it came from. That is, one of their reporters just ... made it up.

And why not? It's not like it will stop anyone from forwarding the next one. The "swallowing semen fights depression in women" story I mentioned above got repeated so often that England's National Health Service had to issue a statement reminding people that if they're suffering from depression they shouldn't try to just blow their way out of it.

... it, like all alarmist predictions your cousin shares on Facebook, is based on the assumption that every trend line on a graph continues in the same direction forever (spoiler alert: they don't). For instance, I grew up hearing every day that overpopulation was so out of control that we would run out of resources by 20 years ago. Today we know that birthrates are now falling worldwide, and so of course here come the predictions that humans will go extinct if current trends continue.